Research

This research adapts techniques to integrate societal considerations in the early stages of technology design, in order to manage the specific challenges that come up in addressing the social impact of infrastructure. The project will (1) use ethnographic participant-observation in the development of farm networking technology and collaboration with technical partners to identify moments where technical decisions could be associated with social impact challenges; (2) conduct fieldwork with agricultural stakeholders to analyze how existing infrastructures incorporating analogous technologies are shaping and shaped by emerging social practices to create specific impacts; (3) develop future design scenarios that flesh out and concretize potential relationships between technological decisions, future policies and organizational practices, and the resulting benefits and drawbacks; and (4) use these scenarios to collaboratively identify specific technical, organizational, and policy options that could improve the benefits or reduce the drawbacks of on-farm high-bandwidth communication technologies.